My Home is my Castle? The Role of Living Arrangements on Experiencing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence From Germany

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, social restrictions and social distancing policies forced large parts of social life to take place within the household. However, comparatively little is known about how private living situations shaped individuals experiences of this crisis. To investigate this issue, we analyze how experiences and concerns vary across living arrangements along two dimensions that may be associated with social disadvantage: loneliness and care. In doing so, we employ quantitative text analysis on open-ended questions from survey data on a sample of 1,073 individuals living in Germany. We focus our analyses on four different household structures: living alone, shared living without children, living with a partner and children, and single parents. We find that single parents (who are primarily single mothers) are at high risk of experiencing care-related worries, particularly regarding their financial situation, while individuals living alone are most likely to report feelings of loneliness. Those individuals living in shared houses, with or without children, had the lowest risk of experiencing both loneliness and care-related worries. These findings illustrate that the living situation at home substantially impacts how individuals experienced and coped with the pandemic situation during the first wave of the pandemic.

Evaluation of a Structure Providing Cultural Ecosystem Services in Forest Recreation: Quantitative Text Analysis of Essays by Participants

Cultural ecosystem services are nonmaterial benefits that individuals acquire from the ecosystem, such as recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, and tourism. The quantification of cultural services is considered difficult to accurately make compared to other forest ecosystem services. Although some studies evaluate cultural services from forest recreation, “simple quantification” based on easy-to-obtain data is criticized for disregarding the local context and missing essential details. Therefore, this study evaluates a structure providing cultural services, and the local or detailed factors missed by simple quantification, while illustrating objective and statistical evidence with careful observations and a comprehension of local society. This study focuses on urban resident participation in natural resource management through recreational activities in Japanese mountain villages, using Fujiwara District, Minakami Town, Japan, as a case study, and by conducting a quantitative text analysis of 424 essays containing participants’ experiences and impressions. Using the software KH Coder, the Jaccard index is used to calculate co-occurrence relationships between frequently used words, visualizing the results in a network diagram. Additionally, several codes are added to keywords that characterize this case, and correlations between each code are examined. From the analysis, we discovered that social factors, such as interaction with comrades and locals, considerably influence participants’ positive emotions.

Realising Roma rights through a high-stakes history test: Secondary school students narrating the Swedish Roma past, present and future

Building on theories of historical justice, reconciliation and transformative change, this article investigates how 293 secondary school students make sense of the difficult past, present and future of the Romani in a national history test. Using qualitative and quantitative text analysis, this study seeks to explore whom students foreground as agents of change in regard to the Roma past, present and future. Considering the past and looking to the future, the inquiry led students to narrate four scenarios: no change; a regression to a past state of no rights; a development for the better; a future free from oppression. While the students underscored the importance of a shared responsibility for Roma rights, they stressed the nation state as the single most important agent of change for Roma rights in the present and future. Against the backdrop of justice and change, this study argues that while students realise and recognise Roma rights through their narrational practices, and thus may become empowered to act for a just future, these narratives also re-establish historical cultural and ethnic group boundaries which potentially may disempower young learners.

Talking About Education: How Topics Vary Between International Organizations

In this chapter, Raphael Heiberger and Michael Windzio examine which topics are important for major education international organization (IOs). IOs in the field of education follow different ideological paradigms in the global education discourse. Yet, it is an open question as to whether different types of IOs focus on different topics and thereby support different paradigms of education. Based on more than 1000 documents with over 40 million words published by the World Bank, UNESCO, the ILO, the OECD, ISESCO, and SEAMEO, they explore education issues addressed in this sample. Using standardized methods of quantitative text analysis and topic modeling, Heiberger and Windzio reveal that major topics found in these documents do indeed differ between the different types of organizations.

Understanding the relationship between onomatopoeic expressions and sound quality for rotary switch operating sounds

In our daily lives, we often use onomatopoeia to convey images of products. However, the correspondence between onomatopoeia and physical quantities is not clear. To apply onomatopoeia to product design, we focused on the relationship between the sound symbolism of onomatopoeia and product sound quality. The target of the evaluation was the operation sound of the rotary switch. A subjective evaluation experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to free answer to the impressions associated with the operation sounds using onomatopoeic expressions. The obtained onomatopoeia was then analyzed by quantitative text analysis using mora as the unit of analysis. The results showed the voiced consonants appeared more frequently in the louder operation sounds. In addition, the vowel /o/ appeared more frequently in sounds with low sharpness, and the vowel /i/ appeared more frequently in sounds with high sharpness. Since these trends are similar to other studies on sound symbolism, this study shows the possibility of using onomatopoeia in product design by utilizing sound symbolism.

Effective Coping Strategies Employed by University Students in Three Sensitivity Groups: A Quantitative Text Analysis

People differ in their sensitivity to internal and external stimuli, falling into one of three sensitivity groups (low, medium, and high). Studies have pointed out that individual differences in sensitivity should be considered in psychological intervention settings. This study aimed to explore effective coping strategies in the three sensitivity groups. In total, 692 Japanese university students (389 females; Mage = 20.6 ± 1.4 years) responded to an open-ended question about the coping strategies they employ, and to two self-report measures assessing their level of sensitivity and mental health. A series of co-occurrence network analyses with two grouping variables (i.e., better or poorer mental health) suggested that effective coping strategies differed among the three sensitivity groups.

Nascent Entrepreneurship: Exploratory Research Based on Systematic Literature Review and Text Analysis

A brilliant idea means nothing if it stays in someone’s mind and doesn’t come to life. The process of an idea developed into a new business is very unstable, like a balloon in the wind that can blow in any possible direction. Sometimes the idea gets thrown away, sometimes it creates something extraordinary. Studies on nascent entrepreneurs contribute to the understanding of the factors affecting the intention of an individual to become an entrepreneur. Nascent entrepreneurship is a rather new topic of research. There are large number of journals on the topic only since the early 2000’s. There are several challenges in defining the topic accurately since the beginning and the end of the process is not always clear. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between the idea phase and the ongoing work in progress. In addition, research results are difficult to compare with each other because of conceptual uncertainties and different approaches. In this paper the most important literary background related to nascent entrepreneurship is presented. In this study, keyword searches reveal the most frequently researched conceptual approaches to the intention of starting a new business. In the critical analysis of selected papers, the research is confined to the field of business and management and economics, which I explore with the steps of the Systematic Literature Review methodology. In the comprehensive literature review is based on bibliometric analysis and quantitative text analysis. Results, proposals and future research areas are also presented.

How the public understands news media trust: An open-ended approach

Despite the central role that ordinary citizens play as ‘trustors’ (i.e. the actor that places trust) in the literature on news media trust, prior quantitative studies have paid little attention to how ordinary citizens understand and define news media trust. Here, trust tends to be studied from a researcher-defined – rather than an audience-defined – perspective. To address this gap, we investigate how the public describes news media trust in their own words by asking them directly. We analyse 1500 written responses collected through a Norwegian online probability-based survey, here using a semisupervised quantitative text analysis technique called structural topic modelling (STM). We find that citizens’ own understanding of news media trust can be categorised into four distinct topics that, in some instances, are comparable to academic and professional discourse. We show that citizens’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by many of the same variables that prior research has found to be important predictors of levels of trust. Respondents’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by education and satisfaction with democracy but not other known predictors of trust, such as ideological self-placement and political preferences.

Information exposure, perceptions and behaviours during the first COVID-19 wave in Germany: Evidence from survey and Facebook data

The role of information exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic seems ambiguous, as gains in knowledge from public information campaigns stand against fears of widespread misinformation, especially via social media. Using data from a large survey collected during the first COVID-19 wave in March 2020 as well as data from Facebook, this paper investigates from which sources (e.g., public or commercial broadcasting, newspapers or Facebook) Germans received news and how information exposure relates to perceptions, attitudes and behaviours concerning COVID-19. Regression analyses based on the survey data show that getting COVID-19-related information from a multitude of sources strongly predicted positive public health outcomes and that no individual source had negative effects. A quantitative text analysis of almost a million German public Facebook posts indicates that the positive individual-level effects might be related to a uniform coverage of COVID-19 that emphasised the severity of the pandemic, whereas misinformation seemed to be less widespread than feared. The results suggest that fears of an `infodemic' may be overstated and that the high salience of COVID-19 in media coverage helped the efforts to mitigate the pandemic. We discuss the findings against the backdrop of an increased politicisation of public-health measures during later COVID-19 waves.